China re­mains the world’s largest e-com­merce mar­ket with on­line sales in the first quar­ter of this year reach­ing $307.4 bil­lion, up 35.4 per­cent year-on-year.

In the US, on­line re­tail sales in the first quar­ter reached $123.6 bil­lion, up 16 per­cent year-on-year, ac­cord­ing to a re­port from PwC, a global pro­fes­sional ser­vices net­work.

Gold­man Sachs fore­cast that this year, con­sump­tion in China may con­trib­ute 4.9 per­cent­age points of the ex­pected GDP growth rate of 6.6 per­cent, higher than 4.5 per­cent­age points last year. But con­sump­tion is likely to slow next year, and is es­ti­mated to con­trib­ute 4.3 per­cent­age points of the GDP growth.

The “still-solid la­bor mar­ket and steady wage growth” could sup­port the pos­i­tive ex­pec­ta­tion on Chi­nese con­sump­tion in 2019, said MK Tang, an econ­o­mist with Gold­man Sachs.

As per NBS data, un­em­ploy­ment rate fell marginally this year. “Our wage tracker sug­gests nom­i­nal wage growth sta­bi­lized at around 7.2 per­cent year-on-year this year, af­ter mod­er­at­ing for three to four years since 2013. This should off­set some of the down­ward pres­sures,” Tang said.

Re­cent sur­veys by the NBS and the cen­tral bank sug­gested that the con­sumer con­fi­dence level edged down of late, as re­flected in fewer ur­ban bank de­pos­i­tors will­ing to con­sume.

Ac­cord­ing to a Gold­man Sachs re­port, ex­pec­ta­tion of fur­ther weak­en­ing in fixed-as­set in­vest­ments, es­pe­cially in in­fra­struc­ture, is likely to ac­cel­er­ate pol­icy sup­port mea­sures to pro­tect growth.

“Wor­ries about a pos­si­ble come­back of the debt-driven growth model, or a di­min­ished eco­nomic role of pri­vate en­ter­prises, weigh heav­ily on in­vestors’ minds. Pol­i­cy­mak­ers need to strike a fine bal­ance be­tween avert­ing a sharp slide in growth and pre­vent­ing a fast debt buildup,” GS said in its re­port.